Synaxis TV

• Woke late and went to UU church. The topic was “when cultures collide,” and the reverend argued that democracy is about pluralism, not secularism. I tend to agree…
• IHOP was too crowded, so Lally and I went to Perkins. She ate jelly, and disagreed with me about pleasure theory, focusing on altruism. She also believes in free will.
• Read for prosem in the union into the late evening. I said hello to this guy Bob I saw last Sunday, and he talked to me about working at Taco Bell and football. I think he might be slightly autistic. I hope he’s doing alright. Man this world sucks…
• I ate natural creamy peanut butter, looked over Japanese, and glanced at some articles on yoseba (day labor centers in Japan) and the evolution of altruism.

• Woke early and read Desiring China.
• Went to a lecture on thinking about social justice in terms of the “affective economy.”
• Spent the rest of the day reading, with a long nap thrown in for kicks. The new season of The Office started, and the first episode was so great…

• Japanese: I made stupid mistakes on my last exam, but still got a decent grade.
• Illinois Anthropology: Charles said, “Good science is very postmodern.” And the clicker to my car fell out of a hole in my pocket on the way to class…
• I went to the Graduate Student Reception at La Casa Cultural Latina. I scanned the ground on my way there, but didn’t find my clicker. I talked to Mari about boys that control their girlfriend’s hairstyle, and girls who go through a drastic hairstyle change once they are single.
• Read at Starbucks, though I was tired and kept dozing off. This guy sat next to me who I thought looked familiar, and then I figured out that I had seen him in a friend’s picture on Facebook. Luis and I introduced ourselves, and then I learned that he had a very negative, theory related, experience with anthropology, and would rather “just write.”
• I called my sister and cried about the difficulties I face finding people I can stand.

• I didn’t wake up in time for Japanese, and slept until noon.
• I went to campus to meet with Paul, and we talked about my prosem project.
• I went to Best Buy, Target, the mall (did get some chocolate-covered gummy bears), and finally Circuit City in a successful attempt to get a new pair of headphones (left side on the old pair magically crapped out for no visible reason).
• Revamped my project for prosem at Panera — currently focused on the effect that malnutrition among the indigenous peoples of Ecuador has had on their culture, via Greene’s 1977 chapter, “Hyperendemic goiter, cretinism, and social organization in highland Ecuador.”
• Went to see Paprika at Boardman’s Art Theatre — it was so very incredible. I suffered a healthy dose of dissociation after the movie. I liked the comparison between dreams and the Internet as a place for the repressed psyche to run free, and the protection of dreams as the final place to be free against the onslaught of technology as the focal point of the film. Independent film in an art theater — just like old times. And I didn’t even have to leave town…
• Groceries
• Laundry

Yesterday Alicia Arrizon came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to give a presentation on her new book, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. After her presentation she stayed to meet with the Comparative Queer Studies Reading Group.

At the beginning of the reading group Arrizon said there is not enough sensuality in the work being produced on queer issues. Regarding her book, I later said I enjoyed her treatment of the term tortillera, which “alludes to women making love as analogous to the making of tortillas” (Arrizon 2006:164), because it made salient the way that the body is sometimes present in language, and because it stood in such sharp contrast with the term lesbian, which Anzaldua (quoted in Arrizon 2006:167-168) found to be “a cerebral word, white, and middle-class.”

However, I asked Arrizon why, if she is critical of a certain lack of sensuality in the work being produced on queer issues, did she hesitate in her presentation when she brought up the term tortillera, deciding not to fully explain the term, and instead leaving a gap for the audience to fill in?

Arrizon said she would have to think about this. But I think it points to the difficulties we face in being “sensual” in public, and perhaps helps to explain the dominance of the “cerebral.” (Which in turn leads to an interrogation of the “white” and “middle-class” associations with “cerebral.” Is “cerebral” to “sensual” as “white” and “middle-class” are to “people of color” and “working class”?)

Arrizon, Alicia. 2006. Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.